For maximum benefits of virtualization, storage management is key

Server virtualization increases the complexity of storage management and forces administrators to pay even closer attention to issues such as available bandwidth and overprovisioning. Approaching management and provisioning in the same way as in a traditional environment could be an invitation for poor performance, wasted capacity and risky data protection techniques. Each of the major server virtualization vendors takes a slightly different approach to storage management and configuration, which might dictate aspects such as recommended protocols, feature sets and data protection schemes. But in addition to this, storage administrators must be sure to construct storage architectures based on different requirements than what they might architect in a traditional, non-virtualized environment. They need to provide an increased level of performance because virtualization multiplexes data that was once sequential together, making it more difficult to read and write. Providing fault tolerance against hardware failures is also essential to keeping virtual machines (VMs) and their applications up and running. The VM storage also must commonly support either multi-path connectivity or storage replication so that running VMs can be moved between host servers on an as-needed basis with little to no downtime. This e-book will help storage administrators plan for these requirements before architecting storage for their virtual environments.